Careerist Mantras

As B.F. Skinner has said, we build our repertoire of responses to be consistent with our personality. We all have a consensus-seeking personality but some people seem to have little else, causing problems for all of us.

For example, sceptics and careerists often see that certain political mantras are absurd while believers do not. To begin with, believers cannot even see the mantra as political. They may, for example, be presented as scientific. Sceptics stand back from the absurdity while careerists weave the controlling mantra into their career, not necessarily a political career.

This continues until the political mantra becomes too absurd to deceive anyone with even the most gullible personality. But by then it is too late because careerists have established yet another controlling political game which is all that is left of the original mantra. As happened in the USSR under Stalin and is now happening in China under Xi.

Anthony Daniels, AKA Theodore Dalrymple, has reached the conclusion that communist regimes have used absurd mantras to humiliate and thereby control the general population. North Korea is a very good example of that, North Korean political mantras being riddled with obvious absurdities.

Eventually even the general population comes, via bitter experience, to know that the mantras are absurd. Careerist officials always knew they were absurd, but the mantras are established and it has become dangerous to be openly sceptical.

Even within supposed democracies we have seen careerists pushing absurd political mantras. They demean the mass of believers after smoothing the way for unbelieving careerists. Our political careerists are well on the way to discarding democracy in just this way - once they deal with sceptics.